Choose to Compete

Charles M. Vest
President
National Academy of Engineering

Look back about 25 years and think about what was not going on. There was no World Wide Web. Cell phones and wireless communication were in the embryonic stage. The big challenge was the inability of the American manufacturing sector to compete in world markets; Japan was about to bury us economically. The human genome had not been sequenced. There were no carbon nanotubes. Buckminster Fullerines had been around for about five years. We hadn’t even begun to inflate the dot-com bubble, let alone watch it burst. And terrorism was something that happened in other parts of the world.

Some of the grandest accomplishments in human history were engineered in the century just passed. The widespread development and distribution of electricity and clean water, automobiles and airplanes, radio and television, spacecraft and lasers, antibiotics and medical imaging, and computers and the Internet are just some of the changes that transformed virtually every aspect of human life.

The century ahead poses even more formidable challenges. As the population grows and its needs and desires expand, the problem of sustaining civilization’s continuing advancement, while still improving the quality of life, looms more immediate. Old and new threats to personal and public health demand more effective and more readily available treatments. Vulnerabilities to pandemic diseases, terrorist violence and natural disasters require serious searches for new methods of protection and prevention. Breakthroughs in energy security and sustainability—whether a revolution in solar cells or sequestering carbon generated by burning fossil fuels or nuclear fusion—would be game-changing in important ways.

The world is changing remarkably fast, and leadership in science and engineering will drive it. Where will this leadership come from? China? India? The United States? That choice is ours to make. Choosing to compete means that United States must lead in brainpower, organization and innovation.